'A boy who doesn't stand up for himself ends up not standing up for anything,' says Baba, a liberal and affluent intellectual, of his son Amir after he displays yet again the spinelessness that would eventually lead to the incident that changes his and his boyhood friend Hassan's life.

It's not something that can be said of Marc Forster's film, though: the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's novel is passionate if at times melodramatic, channelling well the conflicts and fears that has driven Afghanistan and its people to oblivion under Russian occupation and then the reign of the Taleban.

The film begins in 2000 in San Francisco, with Amir (Khalid Abdalla) now a writer awaiting the publication of his first book. A telephone call from Pakistan dissipates the joy of receiving the first copies of his work and sends Amir's thoughts back to Kabul in 1978, with the Afghan capital just months away from being invaded by the Red Army from the north.

The setting provides the backdrop to which Amir (Zekaria Ebrahimi, left) and his playmate-cum-servant Hassan (a spectacular turn by Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, far left) - a boy of the Hazara minority - see their friendship cast asunder when the rich daddy's boy fails to rescue his friend from an act of brutality by bullies.

His self-loathing eventually morphs into a disdain towards Hassan, who is forced to leave and is lost forever as the Russians close in and Amir's family flees to the US. From then on, it's a story of exile, reconciliation and eventual return, when Amir finally exorcises his demons by settling scores with an old nemesis and participating in an escapade that allows Hassan's spirit to be revived.

While the film's finale veers towards the contrived, Forster has generally done justice to the original material by injecting humanity into the locale. Baba, for example, is provided with a rounded personality that's more than a caricature, a modern yet flawed individual who's as much a symbol of the Afghan nation: 'The mullahs want to save our souls and the communists are telling us we don't have any,' he says, quickly adding, 'More importantly, El Cid is playing today.'

Such observations are given more poignancy in the second part of the film, when Baba and Amir confront life in the US.

The Kite Runner certainly harbours flaws, but it remains one of the more reflective, although not gritty, screen manifestations of contemporary Afghan history that's been offered to cinema lovers around the world in recent years.

The Kite Runner opens today